Regime Theory Thirty Years On: Taking Stock, Moving Forward Written by Oran R. Young This PDF is auto-generated for reference only. As such, it may contain some conversion errors and/or missing information. For all formal use please refer to the official version on the website, as linked below. Regime Theory Thirty Years On: Taking Stock, Moving Forward https://www.e-ir.info/2012/09/18/regime-theory-thirty-years-on-taking-stock-moving-forward/ ORAN R. YOUNG, SEP 18 2012 The 30th anniversary of the International Organization special issue on international regimes[1] provides a good opportunity to take stock of the substantial stream of regime analysis that has developed over the last several decades and to consider whether this stream has run its course or continues to offer a source of inspiration for researchers interested in understanding the conditions governing international cooperation. It is worth noting at the outset that those of us who developed regime analysis as a way to structure our work in the 1970s and contributed articles to the special issue of International Organization in 1982 had no idea how this research program would take off during the remainder of the 1980s and beyond. We knew from the outset, of course, that regime analysis would be helpful as a means of getting around the formalism that marked much work on international organizations at the time and that it could provide the basis for thinking about what we have come to refer to as governance without government at the international level.[2] But we did not anticipate that regime analysis would become intertwined with the rise of international political economy and international environmental governance as vibrant fields of study and provide intellectual capital that would prove valuable to the rapidly growing community of researchers working in these fields. Regime analysis has had its detractors as well as its advocates more or less from the outset. Susan Strange’s warning about dragons and the dangers of faddism in her contribution to the 1982 special issue remains one of the most forceful neo-realist critiques of the basic premise of regime analysis concerning the roles that institutions play as determinants of the course of international affairs.[3] John Mearsheimer presented a similar neo-realist attack in the mid-nineties in his critique of what he characterized as the “false promise” of international institutions.[4] More recently, the chorus of skeptics has grown, though it is often difficult to tell whether those who have joined this number have something new to contribute to the debate or are merely influenced by the faddishness of a discipline that seems to require an infusion of new analytical frameworks from time to time to create a sense of intellectual vigor. In this short essay on the achievements of regime theory and its prospects going forward, I address three questions. What is at stake in the debates about international regimes and about the significance of the work of those who study them? What have we learned about this matter over the last 3-4 decades from both qualitative and quantitative studies of international institutions? Does regime theory have a future as a productive research program as we move deeper into the 21st century? For those who know my work, it will come as no surprise that I believe this line of thinking deals with issues of fundamental importance that are not going to go away anytime soon. But let me endeavor to encapsulate my views on these questions and to present the case for regime analysis in the form of responses to the three questions. What is at stake? The crux of the debate regarding the contribution of regime analysis centers on the role of social institutions as determinants of the course of interactions among the actors in international society. To understand the significance of this issue, it is helpful to start with some definitions. Institutions are assemblages of rights, rules, and decisionmaking procedures that give rise to social practices, assign roles to the participants in these practices, and regulate E-International Relations ISSN 2053-8626 Page 1/5 Regime Theory Thirty Years On: Taking Stock, Moving Forward Written by Oran R. Young interactions among them. Regimes, on this account, are institutions that are specialized to a particular issue (e.g. the nuclear nonproliferation regime, the trade regime, the regime for stratospheric ozone) or a spatially defined area (e.g. the regime for Antarctica, the regime for the North Sea). Whereas institutions are assemblages of rights, rules, and decisionmaking procedures, organizations are material entities that have offices, personnel, budgets, and legal personality. Many institutions include organizations (e.g. the WTO, the secretariat of the UNFCCC) that play significant roles in administering their provisions or depend on separate organizations (e.g. UNEP in the case of the ozone regime) to play these roles. But this is not always the case. As a result, the relationship between institutions and organizations emerges as an important focus of analysis rather than a matter to be disposed of by definition.[5] With these definitions in hand, we can return to the question of what is at stake in thinking about the contribution of regime analysis. Views regarding the role of social institutions vary dramatically. Douglass North, for example, explains the rise of the West from the 14th century onward largely in terms of institutional developments mainly having to do with systems of property rights.[6] The recent work of Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson broadens this line of analysis, accounting for the success and failure of nations largely in terms of the extent to which economic and especially political institutions are inclusive or exclusive.[7] James March and Johan Olsen develop a somewhat more nuanced version of this line of analysis with particular reference to what they call “international political orders.”[8] Writers like Strange and Mearsheimer, by contrast, stress the role of power as the principal driver of the course of world affairs. In essence, their argument is that institutions including regimes are epiphenomena. They are simply surface manifestations of underlying configurations of power; they change over time in response to shifts in the configuration of power in international society and are not major determinants of outcomes in their own right. Seeking a middle ground, Stephen Krasner, the editor of the special issue of International Organization, introduced the idea of regimes as intervening variables.[9] On this account, other forces, such as geopolitics, population, or technology, constitute the basic drivers in international society. But regimes can play a role in steering human interactions, influencing the impacts of the basic drivers in the process. Given this array of views, the challenge before us is to sort out these diverging perspectives on the role of institutions with particular reference to international society. One concrete way to pose the issue is to ask: what proportion of the variance in the outcomes of interactions among the actors in international society can we attribute to the influence of international regimes? What have we learned? So, what have we learned in the course of the last thirty years that can shed light on this issue? Regime analysis has spawned a large literature, much of it dealing with international economic regimes and environmental regimes but extending also to include accounts that deal with security regimes and human rights regimes. Much of this literature is qualitative in nature and therefore somewhat difficult to assess in terms of the production of cumulative results. But there is also a growing body of quantitative studies dealing with international regimes, making it possible to compare and contrast conclusions arising from both qualitative and quantitative research. Some of the resultant studies are largely descriptive; others treat regimes as dependent variables in the sense that they endeavor to explain the formation and evolution of these institutional arrangements rather than to examine the roles that regimes play as drivers of the outcomes of interactions in international society. Still, there is now enough literature on the roles that regimes play as drivers of the course of international affairs to allow for some assessment of the challenge described in the preceding section.[10] It should come as no surprise that our conclusions about the role of institutions as drivers of outcomes in international society are mixed. There is sufficient evidence to say with some confidence that international regimes do make a considerable difference under a range of conditions but that they certainly do not account for all of the variance in the outcomes of interactions among the actors in international society. Other factors, including those included in the familiar I = PAT formula as well as biogeophysical conditions, culture, the weight of history in the form of path dependence, and leadership, also make a difference.[11] Nor is there a single unambiguous mechanism through which regimes influence the course of interactions in international society. The distinction that March and Olsen introduce between the logic of consequences and the logic of appropriateness is clearly relevant in this connection.[12] More generally, we can say that accounts based solely on utilitarian reasoning, which stress the role of incentives, calculations of benefits and costs, and the idea of rational choice, cannot account for all the consequences of social institutions. Yet the relative importance of what we often describe as collective-action models E-International Relations ISSN 2053-8626 Page 2/5 Regime Theory Thirty Years On: Taking Stock, Moving Forward Written by Oran R. Young and social-practice models of institutional consequences remains an area requiring additional research.[13] One of the most significant findings arising from regime analysis centers on the role of what we have come to think of as complex causality.